![]() ![]() Stanford White, played by an amused, shrewd-eyed Norman Mailer, wearing a grand mustache, a laurel wreath, white tie and tails, is met at a fancy stag dinner that is crashed by the jealous Harry K. Rollins) as he plunks out improvised piano accompaniment to jerky, black-and-white newsreels that describe the ragtime era of Morgan, Houdini, Ford, Teddy Roosevelt and Evelyn Nesbit. ![]() The introductory sequences are most promising. Thaw and Stanford White, all drawn from life, and by Mr. Washington, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. The book is the work of an irrepressible storyteller, its pages filled with odds and ends of fact and fancy, peopled by such characters as J.P. It's about those who profited from the duplicable event and those who got in its way. Doctorow's sprawling, cheerily mordant novel can be easily summed up, ''Ragtime'' is about two kind of people - some of them historical figures and some figments of Mr. Because eccentrics slowed things up, they were suspect. The duplicable event became the basis of an economy and of a civilization, and, by extension, a way of looking at life. Onward and upward: feet replaced by motorized wheels! Each Ford automobile was composed of interchangeable parts so that Model-T's could roll off the Highland Park assembly line, one by one, every six minutes, at a price to make the modern state of horselessness available to the entire population or, at least, to those citizens who mattered. No one, perhaps, perceived this quite so successfully as Henry Ford with his magnificent construction called the Model-T. Doctorow observes with some understatement, ''The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived.'' Somewhere toward the middle of the novel, which has the effect of lighting up the first two decades of this American century with skyrockets and cherry bombs, Mr.
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